Re: Suggestions for monitoring tools?

> Someone e-mailed me privately and suggested Enterprise Manager, and
> that looks like it might work. I'll start there, but I'm open to other
> ideas. I know about Karma, which does more or less what I want, but it
> doesn't appear to have been updated in a long time so I'm not sure I
> want to rely on it.

Hi Janine,

I'm the author of Karma, and you're right it has not been updated in a number of years. I tend to use Nagios (http://nagios.org) these days as it has some really great features, and can monitor the whole enterprise, run tests on remote servers, and is a generally great all-around schedule/notification system. It will monitor ping, http, ssh, disk partitions, logfiles with a builtin plugin, or with any external programs (swatch is one I really like http://swatch.sourceforge.net/)

On the Oracle side it comes with a basic plugin to check that Oracle is alive and the listener is up. However it is fully scriptable with any language. Perl is ideal for this, as Jared and Mladen can attest. I have some scripts I use, and was thinking of releasing a more general plugin which can be configured to do just about any query, and check results. If you're concerned about the overhead of reopening connections to Oracle each time you to a db check, you can use mod_perl with Apache to make connections persistent.

HTH,
Sean

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Sean Hull, Senior Consultant
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Sean Hull, founder and senior consultant of Heavyweight Internet Group
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